


What Happened in D.C.

by LieutenantSaavik



Series: Natasha in D.C. [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Real-World Locations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8358631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: They’re gonna need an official statement from S.H.I.E.L.D. eventually.





	

“And the man, the Hydra agent who fought you on the helicarrier? What happened to him?”

Steve shifts. The congressman, Peter Wenham, gives him another piercing look. The room is large but somehow stifling; it’s crawling with people with cameras and people without cameras and security cameras and seems to scream “bureaucracy” with every white-painted corner, official seal, mahogany table, and suit-clad government member. Steve had hoped to avoid the entire affair, and Natasha had gracefully stepped in to provide her own story of the events, but the world (or the world’s reporters, anyway) wanted Captain America’s story, too. This interviewing has been going on for the past fifteen minutes, but Steve senses an angle. The congressman (or Senator; Steve really doesn’t know) seems keenest to know the play-by-play, rather than the overview. And of that play-by-play, he’s focusing much more on the Hydra agents Steve fought. Whether that’s to arrest anyone they might have missed or some other motive, Steve doesn’t know. But they’re skirting into dangerous territory for him, since he doesn’t know how much he should reveal.

“Tell us, Captain Rogers; what happened to the Hydra agent?” the Wenham asks again, much more forcefully. Steve shakes his head and flicks his eyes over to Natasha, sitting on his left. She places her hand comfortingly over his own and gives him a faint half-smile. Sam, on his right, nudges him with his shoulder. “Just tell him,” he says, low and comforting, too quiet for the congressman or the reporters to hear.

 _They’ll kill him_ ,Steve wants to say, so he tries to communicate with Sam with his eyes. _They’ll kill the Winter Soldier, no matter if I tell him that he saved my life._

“Captain Rogers? We need an official statement from you. We don’t have all day.”

Steve swallows. “He died,” he says.

“Who did?”

“The Winter Soldier. The Hydra operative assigned to kill me. I killed him.”

Sam stiffens almost imperceptibly. He and Natasha both know it isn’t true; after D.C., Natasha had come back to his place, shell-shocked and scraped all over, and when Steve arrived he told them, haltingly and emotionally, that Bucky had pulled him from the river, saved his life, and vanished.

 

“The Winter Soldier?” Mutterings begin to sweep through the room, starting with the two congresswomen next to Wenham, who pull back from the desk and whisper something Steve, with his advanced hearing, can almost catch. One of the two looks into the camera like she’s on The Office and mouths “what?” at the newscasters.

“The rumors are true, then,” Wenham says, pushing himself slightly backward from his desk. “The Winter Soldier is real.”

The courtroom behind Steve and his two friend erupts in noise. Every news outlet is clamoring for words, for photos, for content, surging forward against the roped-off area where Steve, Natasha, and Sam are being interrogated. Or it feels like an interrogation, though Steve was assured all he had to do was provide an honest account of the events that resulted in three massive S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers falling to ruin and raining fire, smoke, and metal parts across great swaths of the East Coast of the U.S.

“Captain Rogers!” “Mr. Rogers!” “Miss Romanoff!” “Mr. Wilson!” “Captain Rogers!”

Steve shakes his head, refusing any and all of the questions, and exhales. Natasha leans over and whispers into his ear, “You’re protecting him.”

“He’d do it for me.”

Natasha sighs. “I take it back,” she continues, after a beat. “You’re not a terrible liar.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Natasha smirks and turns her gaze back to the clamoring reporters. The guards around the room are trying to restore order, but shouts of “The Winter Soldier?!” and “Captain Rogers!” still fill the room.

“ _Hell_ ,” mutters Sam, looking back at the growing chaos only feeding on itself,  “Steve, if they catch you at this, the shitstorm will be huge. I’m talking worldwide levels of shitstorm. Like a decashitstorm or something. You’re sure you thought this through?”

“Sam, if I tell them the truth, they’ll hunt him down. Over 24 assassinations is not something they’ll let slide. He’s probably wanted all over the world by now.”

“He’ll be back, though,” Sam warns, and Steve knows he’s right. “Whether he’ll be back as your friend or as the Soldier, he’ll be back. And if he shows up again as the Soldier, you had better tell them that he’s your friend, first. Or they might shoot on sight. People like this don’t disappear forever.”

 _Don’t I know it?_ Steve presses the backside of his hand to the bridge of his nose, wishing that, for once, things were simple.

“I think Steve made the right call,” Natasha whispers. “Everything we officially say here is going all over the world, to people’s newspapers, televisions, and who knows what else. Every eye that follows any sort of news -- and that’s most people -- would be looking for the Winter Soldier. Besides,” she casts her eyes around the still chaotic courtroom, “look at this. Could you imagine trying to explain to them that not only is the Winter Soldier real but that he survived seventy years without aging and was once Captain America’s best friend, a celebrity, and a war hero? And the brainwashing… some people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, knowing that you could do that to someone’s mind.”

She drops her eyes to the wood of the table. “Well, I know a bit of what it’s like. When they train you to think something, to be something you’re not. It’s not something you want to tell the world.”

“I’m sorry, Natasha,” Sam says, low. He doesn’t know what she went through, but he’s been through hell, too. All three of them have.

Nat shakes her head and gives a tiny, sad smile. “So am I, Wilson.”

“So I’m still Wilson now? Dammit, Romanoff, I’m trying to be nice to you!”

Nat’s smile widens. “Guess that’s just how it is.”

“Rude.”

The room begins to quiet, so the three stop whispering, acting as if they never did. Natasha refolds her hands and tosses a strand of hair back from her forehead. Sam puts his neutral face back on, prepared to answer anything he might get thrown.

“Captain Rogers, are we expected to understand that the Winter Soldier, the mythical Soviet Assassin, is the one responsible for this calamity?”

“With all due respect, sir,” Natasha breaks in, “he’s no myth. He shot me in Odessa and again in D.C.”

She stands and slides off her jacket, revealing a navy blue camisole and the mass of scar tissue on her left shoulder. “There’s another on my stomach, if you’d care to see."

“That won’t be necessary, Miss Romanoff,” the man on Wenham's right replies, unamused. “You may be seated.”

Nat bristles at being told to sit down like a child but refolds herself into the chair. Her clear-polished fingernails drum on the table as she suppresses her irritation with the congressman, with the reporters, with the whole affair. She could be out somewhere, creating a new Natasha, a new disguise, a new cover, a new person to be, but is instead being told to sit down by some government jackass who has insinuated that she belongs in prison.

Sam, meanwhile, is thinking of Riley. He’s never been told the whole story of Bucky and Steve, but he’s starting to understand Steve’s protective behavior. If it were Riley, his most trusted friend and wingman, who had been turned into the Soldier, he’d be protecting him, too. And for the first time he appreciates, really appreciates, how hard it must have been for Steve to fight the assassin wearing the face of his best friend.

“Back to D.C.,” Wenham sighs, seemingly weary now. “You claim the Winter Soldier fought you, and you killed him?”

“Yes,” Steve maintains. He’s learned how to lie better in the few months since Nat asked him why Nick was in his apartment the night he was shot, and he’s making the effort to keep his arms relaxed and his breathing even.

“Why was the body never recovered?”

“He fell into the Potomac River.”

“From the helicarrier?”

“Yes.”

A few mutterings, but no more shouts. “Sir,” ventures Steve, after a moment has gone by, “doesn’t the government of this country have better things to do than spend exorbitant amounts of money on a dig into the Potomac River to search for the body of a dead man?”

“There was no body found when the helicarrier was removed, Captain Rogers.”

“The body must have washed downstream,” Sam says, cutting in. “Happened to someone I knew, when I was in the Air Force. I saw the wreckage of his plane fall. He was dead; the entire front part of the jet covered in flames. Still, we never recovered the body.”

Steve turns shocked eyes on Sam, who just shrugs and looks to the side. “Just one more thing to carry.”

“So, Captain Rogers, is your official statement that, while reprogramming the shield helicarriers, you were fought by none other than the Winter Soldier. After engaging in combat, you killed him, allowed his body to plummet into the water below, jumped off the helicarrier yourself, lost the shield... _somehow_ , and swam yourself to shore, where you promptly passed out and were discovered, unconscious, by Miss Maria Hill.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man is skeptical, and Steve gets more nervous. Nat decides to take matters into her own hands. She stands again, to pull attention away from Steve’s nerves (which he is terrible at hiding) and brushes another stray strand of hair away.

“Maria Hill passed the polygraph test she was given, sir. She saw nobody in the vicinity of Steve’s unconscious body and had a team sweep the area. If you have any doubts about that part of the story, I’m sure you can just ask her.”

“She has already been interrogated, Miss Romanoff. Sit down.”

“So you _do_ admit this is an interrogation,” Sam notes, a hit of victory in his voice.

“Your point, Mr. Wilson?”

Sam glowers. “Nothing, _sir_.” The emphasis on the word emphasizes the fact that he doesn’t think the man is worthy of it.

“I have more to say, if I may,” Natasha begins. “Our stories match up. You seem determined to poke holes in our narratives. I don’t know what you mean to imply -- I assure you that if what you find most unbelievable about this whole story is that the Winter Soldier is real, I can _personally_ provide you with evidence to the contrary.”

“So you’ve stated.”

Nat purses her lips, her annoyance growing.

Sam starts to speak. “She’s right; our stories match. Would you like us to repeat it one more time for you?”

That really gets under the congressman’s skin and Sam watches in satisfaction as a small twitch begins in his forehead.

“What I would like you to further _clarify,_ ” he practically spits, “is how society was ignorant for so long of the existence of the Winter Soldier.”

“He was a Hydra assassin,” Natasha replies. “I could ask the U.S. government the same question -- how were you so ignorant of Hydra’s existence for so long?”

“We believed it went down with the Nazi ship in World War Two, a _reasonable_ assumption. Besides, Miss Romanoff, wasn’t it S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fault that Hydra grew within it?”

“The blame for that does not rest with me,” Natasha says testily. “I would like to remind you that Operation Paperclip was back in the 1940s. And this is getting a bit off-topic, don’t you think?”

“What I think is of no consequence.”

Natasha raises her eyebrows. “Society was ignorant of the Winter Soldier for so long because you refused to believe the people who told you, in no uncertain terms, that he was real.”

There’s a small silence after that. “Well, you can’t blame us," Wenham begins. "The very idea is absurd. That’s the reason I find the whole story so unbeliev-”

Sam cuts him off. “Don’t you see? This is _exactly_ why the Winter Soldier went undiscovered. People tell you he’s real. She showed you a bullet would. Ballistics were run -- Soviet slug, untraceable. That’s his signature. And now you turn around and just, what? Deny our story? Three people maintain it. And people in D.C. _saw_ the Soldier attack Steve and Natasha. Remember the Metrobus? Riddled with bullets. Injured people. They saw him -- saw the Soldier. We’ve got witness after witness. They’re not here today. Why not? Maybe because they’d outnumber you.”

He folds his arms and gestures to the congresspeople. “Were there any of you who went into this with an open mind, prepared to believe our account of what happened? No, of course not. You all just wanted to discredit us and poke holes in our story.”

“Mr. Wilson, please-”

“I think he’s right,” says Steve, standing. “I’ve given you my full and complete account. It corroborates. The Soldier existed but now is dead. And what’s the alternative? That he walked off, leaving none the wiser? Or swam to the Chesapeake Bay? Absurd.”

“We don’t know what a man of his capabilities could do.”

“The Soldier,” Steve emphasizes, “is dead. I killed him. Are you going to call Captain America a liar on national television?”

“You have our full and complete testimonials,” Natasha reminds the congresspeople, before he can reply. “I believe, by your rules, we are done here.”

Wenham sighs. His disbelief has clearly cracked. “Very well. Captain Rogers, Mr. Wilson, Miss Romanoff… You may exit the courtroom.”

Natasha whispers something that sounds quite a bit like “finally” and puts her jacket back on. Steve gives a clipped nod and steps away from his chair while Sam suppresses the urge to punch somebody in the face. “Let’s go,” he mutters to his friends, hands shoved into his pockets. Natasha and Steve follow him out of the room, ignoring the masses of overeager reporters on either side of them.

 

“So. Lunch?” asks Natasha, after they’ve made it a few blocks away and ensured they weren’t being followed by any desperate interns.

“Sounds great,” Steve and Sam say in unison. Nat gives a half-smile. “Nothing like pizza after lying to the government, huh?”

“Well, you’d know a lot about that, wouldn’t you?”

Nat’s eyes flash anger at Sam for a moment, but she sees it was a joke and lightens. “Guess so.”

Hands in their pockets and baseball caps on their heads, walking a few feet apart from each other, they head to the nearest metro station for Natasha’s favorite pizza restaurant. It won’t be a short ride, but Natasha assures them it’ll be worth it.

 

They spend the next few hours at Joe’s Place in Arlington, drowning their thoughts in the best pizza Sam has ever had. Each is thinking of the events they saw and witnessed, and each knows Steve will have to tell the truth, eventually. Like Sam said, Bucky Barnes will be back. And when he is, they -- and the rest of the Avengers -- have to be prepared for anything.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like Steve definitely would have lied to protect Bucky. After all, the Winter Soldier could be wanted in numerous countries as an international criminal. And in Civil War there was no reference to the world hunting Bucky down; just Sam and Steve's personal missions, which I found interesting.
> 
> As a matter of fact, Joe's Place Pizza and Pasta has the best pizza in the world. Unequivocally.


End file.
